Once you want to deny two things in one breath — "neither coffee nor tea", "she doesn't either", "without saying a word" — a single ikke won't reach. Danish has a small toolkit for coordinated and additive negation: the correlative pair hverken...eller, the additive heller ikke, and the participial-style uden at. The trap for English speakers is that two of these (hverken...eller and uden at) already contain the negation, so adding ikke on top double-negates and sounds wrong.
Hverken...eller — "neither...nor"
Hverken...eller is a correlative conjunction that joins two negated alternatives. Crucially, hverken itself carries the negative charge, so you do not add a separate ikke to the clause. Think of hverken as "not-one" and eller as the link to the second item.
Jeg drikker hverken kaffe eller te om aftenen.
I drink neither coffee nor tea in the evening.
Hun var hverken vred eller skuffet — bare overrasket.
She was neither angry nor disappointed — just surprised.
The two slots can hold almost anything as long as they match grammatically: two nouns, two adjectives, two verbs, two whole predicates. What you cannot do is leave a stray ikke in the sentence: hverken has already done that work.
Vi nåede hverken at pakke eller at sige farvel ordentligt.
We managed neither to pack nor to say goodbye properly.
When hverken opens the whole sentence (fronted for emphasis), Danish triggers verb-second inversion, just as any fronted element does:
Hverken læreren eller eleverne forstod opgaven.
Neither the teacher nor the students understood the assignment.
Placement of the pair
The general rule: put hverken immediately before the first of the two parallel items, and eller immediately before the second. The further apart they drift, the harder the sentence is to parse, so keep them tight around the two alternatives.
Han kunne hverken høre eller se ret godt mere.
He could neither hear nor see very well anymore.
Heller ikke — "not either / neither (as a response)"
Heller ikke is the additive negative: it tacks a second negated statement onto a first one. Where English flips between "(me) neither" and "doesn't either", Danish uses one form, heller ikke, and — this is the surprise — usually keeps normal word order with subject-verb inversion when fronted.
Jeg kan ikke svømme. — Det kan jeg heller ikke.
I can't swim. — Neither can I. (literally: that can I not-either)
Notice the structure of the reply: the fronted det triggers inversion (kan jeg), and heller ikke lands in the adverbial slot. This is the natural Danish equivalent of "me neither / neither do I".
Hun spiser ikke kød, og hendes mand gør det heller ikke.
She doesn't eat meat, and her husband doesn't either.
Vi har ikke hørt fra dem, og det har naboerne heller ikke.
We haven't heard from them, and neither have the neighbours.
Compare heller ikke (additive: "also not") with plain også ("also", positive). Heller is simply the negative counterpart of også: you switch from også to heller ikke the moment the shared statement is negative.
Uden at — "without ...-ing"
Uden at introduces a negated accompanying action — it does the job of English "without doing something". Again, the negation is baked in: uden means "without", so no ikke is needed inside the clause. The verb appears in the infinitive.
Hun gik uden at sige et ord.
She left without saying a word.
Du kan ikke lære et sprog uden at lave fejl.
You can't learn a language without making mistakes.
The infinitive works because the uden at clause shares its subject with the main clause — by far the most common case, and the clean choice. When the two subjects differ, Danish keeps uden at but follows it with a finite clause: Hun gik, uden at nogen så det ("She left without anyone seeing it"). Here nogen is a new subject, so the verb så is finite, not an infinitive.
Han forlod mødet uden at have sagt noget som helst.
He left the meeting without having said anything at all.
Common Mistakes
❌ Jeg drikker ikke hverken kaffe eller te.
Incorrect — double negation; hverken already negates.
✅ Jeg drikker hverken kaffe eller te.
I drink neither coffee nor tea.
Hverken carries the negation. Adding ikke is the most common B2-level error here, driven by English speakers who feel the verb still needs a "not".
❌ Jeg kan heller ikke. (as a bare 'me neither' reply)
Incomplete — Danish needs the fronted pronoun + inversion.
✅ Det kan jeg heller ikke.
Me neither. / Neither can I.
English "me neither" is two words; the natural Danish reply fronts det (or jeg) and inverts: Det kan jeg heller ikke. A bare Heller ikke is possible in very casual speech (informal) but sounds clipped.
❌ Hun gik uden at hun sagde noget.
Incorrect — same-subject uden at takes the infinitive, not a finite clause.
✅ Hun gik uden at sige noget.
She left without saying anything.
With one shared subject, uden at + infinitive is the idiomatic form.
❌ Han er hverken høj eller ikke stærk.
Incorrect — the second slot also gets a stray negation.
✅ Han er hverken høj eller stærk.
He is neither tall nor strong.
Both items in hverken...eller are stated positively; the construction negates them jointly.
Key Takeaways
- Built-in negation: hverken...eller and uden at already negate — never add ikke.
- Hverken...eller joins two grammatically parallel items; fronting hverken triggers V2 inversion.
- Heller ikke is the negative of også; the natural "me neither" is Det kan/gør jeg heller ikke, with fronted pronoun and inversion.
- Uden at
- infinitive renders English "without ...-ing" for a shared subject.
Now practice Danish
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Start learning Danish→Related Topics
- Ikke: Placement and ScopeA1 — Where 'not' goes in Danish — after the finite verb in main clauses but before it in subordinate clauses — plus its scope, object shift, and how it negates single constituents.
- Correlative Conjunctions: Både...og, Enten...ellerB2 — Danish paired conjunctions — både...og, enten...eller, hverken...eller, jo...desto and ikke kun...men også — and the word order each one triggers.
- Ingen, Intet and Negative QuantifiersB1 — Danish's incorporated negatives — ingen, intet, ingenting, ingen steder, aldrig — and why they already contain the negation, so ikke must never be added.
- Negation Scope and PositionB2 — How the placement of ikke decides what gets negated — constituent vs. sentential negation, quantifiers, and coordinated or embedded clauses.